The 5:00 AM challenge (14/30)

Good morning! It’s 8:37 as I write this and I have been up for half an hour.

I was WIPED OUT when I went to bed last night and even though I went to bed early, I was still pretty tired when my alarm woke me up at 5:00 AM this morning. I shut it off, slept for another 3 hours, and felt great when I did wake up.

Like a similar occurrence last week, part of the sleepiness could be attributed to the weather: It was grey and drizzly yesterday and I went to bed with a bit of a headache and — no surprise — it started raining steadily through the night and is forecast to continue until tomorrow morning.

This raises a point I’ve been thinking about for a while (and wrote about in this blog post): Getting up at 5:00 AM is a game-changing productivity habit, and it’s not that hard at certain times, but what about times when you’re still exhausted? If I get up but I’m still tired, my level of productivity is not what it needs to be and I end up writing crappy content and deleting copy just as much as I write new copy. And I either do that all day or until I crash for a while on the couch.

What I don’t want to do is say: “Well, if I’m really tired then I’ll just shut off my alarm and go to bed; whereas, if I’m awake I’ll stay up” because at 5:00 AM that is a difficult assessment to make (and at 5:00 AM it’s easy to confuse easy-to-shake grogginess with real go-back-to-bed tiredness).